


The Reason This City Feels Just Like Home

by neurotrophicfactors



Series: In Another Life [4]
Category: Persona 3, Persona 4
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Powers, Fluff, Implied Sexual Content, Intimacy, M/M, Post-Canon, References to Depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-16
Updated: 2017-10-16
Packaged: 2019-01-18 10:30:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12386349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neurotrophicfactors/pseuds/neurotrophicfactors
Summary: Photography is something of a lifelong hobby of Minato's. Souji decides to indulge.





	The Reason This City Feels Just Like Home

**Author's Note:**

> Just wanted to add an additional warning that there is a mention of past attempted suicide, though it's brief and not detailed in any way. The title of this one is from the song Photographic Memory by Sky Eats Airplane--a song I actually haven't really thought about since I was in high school, dang.

It’s brighter in their bedroom than it should be, Souji thinks. The light pierces through his eyelids, turning them red, and he turns onto his stomach with a groan of lazy protest. Warmth on his back, but no contact—thermoreceptors, not mechanoreceptors. The sun shining through their window and splashing across him like an artist’s brush. He’s certain that Minato shut the curtains last night, so that can only mean…

A click and the mechanical whirr of a camera shutter.

Souji grins with a breathy huff of laughter and he hears the shutter go off again. Opens his eyes and finds a camera lens pointed at his face like a single enormous eye, framed by a pair of skinny-fingered hands and a tangle of blue hair, slightly wavy from sweat and sleep.

“You look like a cyclops,” Souji slurs in his newly awakened state.

The camera lowers and Minato’s face appears, pretty and angular with a slight frown. He tugs at his bangs until they cover his right eye entirely and he replies, “I mean, what else is new?”

Souji chuckles and reaches for his wrist, pulling it close so that he can press his mouth to Minato’s fingers. Now that he’s looking he can see that Minato is stretched out on his stomach, propped up on his elbows to take pictures of his sleeping form. He’s slipped on a pair of blue boxer briefs—too loose on his hips, indicating that they’re a pair of Souji’s. A precaution, in case Junpei decides to barge into the room without knocking to announce that they’re out of chips again.

Lips against Minato’s knuckles, Souji whispers, “Kiss me.”

“Picture first,” Minato says. “Now give me my hand back.” He pulls half-heartedly against Souji’s grasp.

“Mean.” Souji releases him with a pout and Minato tucks his knees under his body to sit up, both hands back on the camera.

“Now roll onto your back.”  

Souji wiggles his eyebrows suggestively as he obeys, white sheets twisting around his waist to preserve his modesty. He settles back against his pillow with a sigh and watches Minato watching him through the lens of his camera. It’s one of those chunky Nikons with a flashbulb on top and a dozen buttons and attachments that Minato is always saving up money for. Photography is something of a lifelong hobby of his. He’s good, _really_ good, and Souji has encouraged him to go to school for it in the past, but his response has always been a noncommittal shrug. His mother was a photographer when she was alive and her Nikon F5 sits on their cluttered dresser, still functional though it’s useless without a stock of film. Minato saves it for special occasions.

He wonders what Minato is seeing right now as he gazes through the newer Nikon model in his hands: the sharp contrast of the sunlight pooling on his skin and the dark shadows where it can’t reach, sheltered by the natural peaks and valleys of Souji’s body. He reaches out with his closest hand to brush against Minato’s knee, stroking the side of it with his thumb as he smiles up at him.

“That’s distracting,” Minato says. He presses the shutter button anyway—twice, to account for unsteady hands—and drops the camera to his lap to look at the result on the digital screen.

“ _Kiss_ ,” Souji demands. He’s held up his end of the bargain, after all.

Minato rolls his eyes with a fond murmur of, “So needy,” before he leans down to press their lips together in a chaste, but lingering kiss. Souji grins and then Minato is swinging a leg over him to straddle his thighs, bringing up his camera again. The shutter goes off.

“Are you taking sexy pictures of me now?” Souji asks with laughter in his voice.

“It’s not what I had in mind.” Minato takes another photo before lowering it again. “Why? Are you into that?”

“I’d prefer pictures of you.” Souji takes in the image of Minato hovering over him, all narrow limbs and jagged bone. Legs on either side of his body as the sun cuts a diagonal line across him from shoulder to hip. Souji places his hands on Minato’s thighs and gives them a gentle squeeze. “This looks familiar.”

Minato slaps his chest and says without feeling, “Pervert.”

Souji hums with mirth, running his hands up and down Minato’s legs absently as he eyes the camera in his hands. The more he thinks about it, the more appealing it sounds: capturing Minato on film—well, _pixels_ , he supposes, unless he uses the F5. There’s something romantic about it, like he’s trying to preserve his memory of Minato in this moment so that it remains pristine over the passage of time. He wonders if that’s what Minato was thinking when he woke up this morning and pushed open their bedroom curtains. Minato likes to think that he isn’t romantic, but Souji can see through him like a smooth sheet of glass. Souji barely hears the sound of the shutter over the buzzing of his own thoughts.

Licking his lips, he says, “ _Can_ I take pictures of you?”

Minato raises an eyebrow. “What, like sexy ones?”

“They don’t have to be.”

Minato sighs and leans back, the camera limp in his hands as he searches the ceiling for the answer in his head. Souji hooks his hands behind Minato’s knees and tugs him forward so that he can curl his hands more comfortably around Minato’s waist. He finally shrugs. “Okay. Fuck it. Just no dick pics.”

Souji beams and Minato hands him the camera. This isn’t the first time Souji has ever used it, but it’s a rare occurrence. However, it means that Souji doesn’t need a tutorial before he begins snapping photos. He doesn’t understand all of the functions and settings (or how to change them) and he relies on autofocus for the most part, but he figures that Minato will forgive him if the photos he takes aren’t professional quality.

First Souji takes a picture of Minato looking down at him, then he says, “Trade positions with me.”

Minato does so without protest, climbing off of Souji and then laying on his back while Souji frees himself from his sheet prison. He earns himself a long-suffering look when he insinuates himself between Minato’s legs rather than straddling him. Souji has forgone the boxers.

“If Junpei walks in, _you’re_ doing the explaining,” Minato tells him.

Souji grins and peers through the camera’s eyepiece. He can see immediately why Minato wanted to photograph him like this. The way the sun hits him on the white sheets makes him positively _glow_ and his hair has spread on the pillow beneath him like a dark blue crown. He looks like a god and Souji wants nothing more than to make him immortal.

He presses the shutter button twice for good measure and is unable to resist the urge to place his hand in the centre of Minato’s chest, feeling the rise and fall of it as he breathes. Warmth and Minato’s pulse bleeding into his palm. There’s something very possessive about the gesture, and because the sight of this godlike creature pinned beneath him by his hand like a butterfly to a cushion is intoxicating, Souji takes another photo. Minato stares back at him with parted lips and blue-grey eyes full of fire despite his initial reluctance to relinquish control. His hand comes up to cover Souji’s, and Souji likes this image even more. It feels like an equal exchange: like Minato is pinned there only because he allows himself to be, and because Souji is his. A gift freely given to each other.

Souji photographs it and wishes that he had Minato’s talent for capturing emotions in his pictures, and then he sets the camera aside to lean down and kiss him, gentle, gentle, _gentle_. And again, this time sliding his tongue into Minato’s mouth and sighing contentedly as he feels Minato’s breath against his cheek.

When they part, Souji cradles his jaw and presses their foreheads together. He whispers, “I love you.”

“ _Sap_ ,” Minato calls him, but his eyes are bright and Souji can feel him smiling against his mouth.

Souji pulls away, but not far and not for long. He takes a picture of Minato’s spit-slick lips, his fine-boned hands, the jut of his hips, and the heart-shaped bruise on his throat that Souji sucked into his skin last night because he thought it was cute. By the time Souji decides to renew it, the camera has been forgotten on the bed next to them, and Minato’s stolen boxers soon follow. Together, they burn.

Later, Souji finds the camera again and takes a picture of Minato while they’re still flushed and panting from exertion, sweat cooling on their skin. Souji loves seeing him like this: loose-limbed and eyes slightly glazed over. His composure completely and utterly demolished. Minato always tries to be so aloof, like a mirage, just out of reach; watching him fall apart underneath his ministrations is the most beautiful sight in the world. A few new marks dot his neck, but Minato claimed his revenge—Souji’s back is stinging and his mouth is tender from the final kiss they shared. It may even be bruised.

Minato mumbles, “No dicks,” and Souji laughs.

“Don’t worry,” he assures him, “it’s just from the chest up.”

Minato falls asleep shortly after Souji has finished wiping them down, the morning sun now taking its leave as it creeps onto the floor and toward the wall beneath the window. Armed with his boyfriend’s camera, Souji tugs on a pair of sweatpants and a long-sleeved shirt before he makes a quiet exit. He finds Chidori on the living room couch with her sketchbook after brushing his teeth.

It’s been a month since Chidori moved in with them, the two bedroom apartment now happily housing four. The transition from high testosterone environment to a domestic arrangement with two monogamous couples was astonishingly smooth—though in retrospect, it really shouldn’t have been a surprise. Chidori has always been a common fixture in their lives and Souji was long used to seeing her curled up on the couch or slipping out of Junpei’s bedroom at odd hours. If anything, the most surprising part of it is the fact that Souji moved in before she did.

Souji leans against the bar that separates the living room from the kitchen and snaps a picture of her. Chidori’s eyes flicker up to him with a frosty glare before she turns her attention back to her drawing.

“What are you doing?” she asks blandly.

When they first met, Chidori intimidated him. She was dressed in white lace and chains, and she had constructed an icy exterior that surpassed even Minato’s. But now Souji’s seen her smiling fondly as Junpei tells one of his wild stories, and sharing Minato’s headphones while they doodle in her sketchbook. She laughs like a demon during horror films and wears t-shirts and sweats around the apartment. She’s equally as likely to fish one of Minato’s shirts out of the clean laundry bin as she is to grab one of Junpei’s, because Junpei may smell like home, but Minato’s style is a little closer to hers and they wear the same size. Once, Souji found her wearing one of _his_ shirts. He didn’t comment on it and he doesn’t know if she even realized what she’d done, but it had felt like acceptance. Two weeks ago she painted Souji’s nails dark crimson and the night before last, Minato braided her hair.

So now Souji simply smiles at her and says, “Borrowing Minato’s camera.”

Chidori hums with vague disinterest and lets him be. There’s no sign of Junpei, so he must either be sleeping or out—perhaps buying groceries or coaching little league baseball since it’s Sunday. Souji settles on the couch cushion farthest from Chidori and starts reviewing the images on Minato’s camera.

The first image, of course, is Chidori. There’s nothing particularly artistic about it, but she looks nice. She’s wearing one of Minato’s shirts today—a black band tee for a group they both like—and her cherry red hair has been pulled back into a ponytail. Her lips are pursed in concentration, but her eyes are calm pools of bronze. The lighting is soft and she looks very comfortable; like she’s in her element. Souji flips to the next picture and bites his lip.

A year ago, it would have been more than enough to make him blush, but now it merely elicits a devilish grin. As promised, the photo is cropped just below Minato’s chest to hide the worst of the physical evidence of their activities, but even still there’s no mistaking what this is. Minato looks _debauched_. His hair is wild from Souji running his hands through it, eyes barely focused and his pupils dilated, lips parted and kissed red. Blood coaxed to the surface of his skin until he’s scarlet down to his chest and his hands lying limply on either side of his head. The heart made of hickeys on his throat. It makes Souji want to go back to their bedroom and take Minato apart all over again.

Instead he continues to go through the photos on the camera. He spends little time looking at his own pictures (though he does pause on the picture of Minato holding his hand to his chest reverently. Tethered by choice. He thinks of the sensation of Minato’s heart beating beneath his palm) and when he reaches Minato’s, his breath catches.

Souji has said it a thousand times before, but Minato has a gift. He can scarcely believe that he’s looking at pictures of himself as he flips through the images one by one. The way the sun is hitting him makes it look like he’s made of silver and gold, and with the white of the sheets behind him he looks _angelic_. His eyes are on Minato, through the camera, and they’re so full of love that Souji’s chest tightens just from experiencing it second-hand. This is what Minato sees.

He breathes in slowly and exhales. Keeps going. Some of the pictures are focused on specific parts of his body: one of his hands, the fingers loosely curled toward his palm; his jaw, made sharp by the contrast of sun and shadow; the pair of freckles halfway between his collarbone and left nipple. Even these fragmented images are saturated with this quiet sense of intimacy and Souji thinks, a little lightheaded, _he really loves me_. He knows it, because he sees the way Minato looks at him and Minato tells him so, but it’s different from actually seeing himself through Minato’s eyes.

He finds the pictures Minato took of him while he was still asleep, his face completely relaxed and looking almost younger. His favourite is the picture Minato took just after opening the curtains: taken from the window with Souji’s back to him, but Minato is standing in the path of the sunlight so that his shadow stretches across him. The next picture is of tree branches encased in ice from the freezing rain that fell on Iwatodai last week, coating the city in a crystalline exoskeleton.

Souji turns off the camera and sighs, heart pounding, and leans into the back of the couch.

He makes coffee.

Souji doesn’t drink it often, but it isn’t for him. He stirs a single teaspoon of sugar into it and makes green tea for himself and Chidori. She thanks him with a small smile as he sets her mug down on the coffee table in front of her, and then he sits cross-legged with his own mug held between his palms, staring absently at the empty spot next to Minato’s camera on the table where the coffee mug will surely go. He blows on his tea and smiles to himself. The only sounds he can hear are the steady ticking of the kitchen clock and the whisper-soft scraping of Chidori’s pencil on paper. He thinks, _this is home_.

A door opens a few minutes later and then Minato is emerging from the hallway, the blue boxer briefs making a resurgence with the addition of Souji’s grey university hoodie, the sleeves dangling past his fingertips. Minato thumps over to the kitchen counter, finding his coffee, and then he walks over to the couch to plop himself neatly in Souji’s lap without prompting. Sideways, so that Souji’s left knee is pressed into the small of his back while he drapes his legs over the right. Souji kisses the side of his head and Minato hums contentedly as he leans into Souji’s chest, sipping his coffee. Warmth, where they’re pressed together, fitting like two jigsaw pieces.

When Minato has drank about half of his coffee, Souji announces, “I should make breakfast.”

“Can I talk to you first?” Minato says quietly. He’s staring at their knees, not-quite frowning. It’s a contemplative expression, which eases some of the alarms that start blaring reflexively in Souji’s mind. Thinking of Minato’s pictures of him silences a few more.

“Okay.”

Coffee mug in hand, Minato climbs to his feet and leads Souji to their bedroom, where he sits on the bed cross-legged. The sight of the coffee swirling in his cup over the white sheets makes a needlepoint of anxiety spike through Souji, like stepping on a sewing pin, but he ignores it as he joins Minato on the bed, cradling his tea conscientiously. The sun has successfully made its escape from their room as morning ticks over into afternoon and it reaches the zenith of its arc, high above the apartment complex and a hundred million kilometers away. The light it’s left behind is diffuse, gentler as Minato watches the mug in his hands, running his index finger along the rim of it with his head bent low. Souji resists the impulse to reach out with his fingers and tease the tangles from his hair.

Minato chews on his lip for a moment, then says, “When I turned twenty last year, I gained legal possession of my parents' house. We’d only been together for several months, so I didn’t say anything.”

That seems reasonable, but there’s a reason Minato is telling him about this now. Souji inclines his head. “ _Okay_.”

“I knew that they’d left it to me and for most of my life the plan was just to sell it,” Minato says, “but lately I’ve been thinking…” He sucks in a slow breath before letting it out and he raises a shaking hand to brush his bangs from his eyes. “I think I’d like to try living there again. With you. Not right away, but, um…” He trails off, eyes sliding to the corner of the bed.

Souji’s breath catches. It’s not out of the question to believe that they’d be ready for it. Souji has been living with him and Junpei since he started university last April, and while there’s been the occasional pocket of turbulence, it’s always been navigable—never enough to make them crash and burn. Minato has been his first for _everything._ First date, first boyfriend, first kiss (the kiss that was stolen by Ebihara Ai in second year doesn’t count—that was only teasing), first love. This feels like the next logical step; and maybe it’s coming a little faster than Souji anticipated, but Minato said that this wasn’t immediate. Perhaps he’s waiting for Souji to become legally independent next January or…

Understanding dawns. “You want Junpei and Chidori to move in with us.”

Minato nods sheepishly. “It’s a three bedroom place, which seems like a little much for just the two of us. And we could convert the third bedroom into a studio. It’s just a thought right now—Junpei and Chidori are still getting used to living with each other and we’d have to wait for your next birthday anyway. But I was thinking maybe I could take you there sometime. I haven’t really been back there since I was a kid, so…”

Once, when Minato was at work and they were back at the apartment alone, Junpei confided in Souji that Chidori tried to commit suicide in their second year of high school—and very nearly succeeded. She’s been going to therapy every other Thursday morning ever since. When she told him that she was applying to art school, he cried almost as much as he did when he thought he’d lost her.

“Chidori and Minato get along because they’re the same,” Junpei told him. “They _get_ each other. And for people like them, the best gift they can give you is a long-term plan, because it means they’re planning on sticking around long enough to see it through.”

Souji had gone quiet then, pensive, and then he said, “Has Minato ever…?”

“No,” Junpei said firmly, “not for as long as I’ve known him. But I know he’s thought about it. Not since you guys have been together, but yeah.”

Souji has thought about that conversation a lot in the months that followed, and he’s very certain that that was Junpei’s intention. It makes Souji wring his hands together and count his breaths on the nights after he’s dropped casual comments about Minato’s future and received a dismissive response. He pays closer attention to what Minato says and what he doesn’t say when his mood spirals and he can barely motivate himself to get out of bed in the morning. It’s a little frightening, loving someone who’s caught in a love triangle between life and death.

Living in his parents’ house after Souji reaches the age of majority and waiting for his best friends to adjust to their relationship upgrade and join them? That sounds a lot like commitment.

Souji sets his tea on the bedside table and then carefully extracts the coffee mug from Minato’s hands to do the same. Then he takes Minato’s hands in his and leans in to kiss him sweetly on the mouth.

“I love you,” he says.

Minato’s shoulders sag with relief and his answering smile is brilliant, the sun returning to shine once more. Squeezing Souji’s fingers, he kisses him back. “I love you too.”

They fall to their sides on the bed together, and for a while they forget about breakfast and everything else that isn’t each other. Their drinks go cold.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!! Don't worry, this isn't the end. I'm not writing these in any particular order so future stories may take place anywhere in the timeline I've generated in my head.


End file.
